ok. I think that sounds ok to me -- at least for now -- it's a little hard to explain to students -- but then writing math into the essay questions will be a bit unfamiliar in any case so one more thing won't hurt much.

-- interesting -- there has always been some tension between running latex on the entire TEXT segment or just on the formula parts -- I've tended to favor the former -- particularly when computers were slower. -- perhaps one could revisit the question.

this comes up in wiki's and things like that all the time. I'm particle to MarkDown for much the same reasons David gives. markdown in general is not one spec and there are better and worse versions of markdown. either the official one or perhaps the one used by github would be good.